Slashdot Mirror
British Airways CEO Won't Resign, Says Outsourcing Not To Blame For IT Failure (bbc.com)
British Airways CEO Alex Cruz insisted he would not resign on Monday as he sought to draw a line under three days of chaos at the UK flag carrier after IT problems left tens of thousands of passenger stranded. In an interview -- the first since a global computer outage all but shut the airline down -- Cruz said he doesn't think "it would make much of use for me to resign." Separately, he also denied an outsourcing deal was to blame for the IT problems that hit on Saturday, causing the airline to cancel almost all its services over the weekend. From a report: A leaked staff email revealed Mr Cruz had told staff not to comment on the system failure. When asked about the email he told the BBC the tone was clear: "Stop moaning and come and help us." The airline is now close to full operational capacity after the problems resulted in mass flight cancellations at Heathrow and Gatwick over the bank holiday weekend. Questions remain about how a power problem could have had such impact, said the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones. One theory was that returning systems were unusable as the data had become unsynchronised. [...] Cruz told the BBC a power surge, had "only lasted a few minutes," but the back-up system had not worked properly. He said the IT failure was not due to technical staff being outsourced from the UK to India.
We need communism now!
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
I remember when people would say that "X happened in Y with outcome Z", but here we don't get to know anything of what went wrong?
Not telling me in detail means I am highly unlikely to fly with them as they are seen as untrustworthy with something to hide.
Having a foreign IT staff isn't the issue, having an incompetent IT staff that is not able to manage the system and deal with issues like this is. If you are firing people who are able to do this and bringing in people who are barely able to hold stuff together because it lowers the salaries you pay then it is your own fault.
Be careful. You might get what you wish for. With all the scary anti-privacy laws, the UK is definitely heading in the "right" direction.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
He's just admitted that rabid cost-cutting measures were responsible for the outage, and said cost-cutting measures were his fault, it just wasn't outsourcing that was to blame.
Either BA didn't update mission-critical infrastructure that is long past its expiry date, or they ignored the needs of mission-critical infrastructure (which includes having well-trained operators who know what to do when 'things get out of sync'. So it is still his *&^% fault.
I don't think that it would make much of use for me, to resign.
There, fixed that for you. Commas are important.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
The backup didn't work. Wow. Who woulda thunk? I suspect some IT person complained about the backup procedures being inadequate and he was probably fired. Someone else asked if they could actually test the backup and they were given a demotion.
And now that the backup failed to actually be a backup, we're all shocked and surprised (and it's definitiley not management's fault).
I tested my backups daily by importing the data into a different database. (Of couse, I'm an Oracle admin and am used to having failed backups).
Dear British Airways Upper Management,
This is your fault. To avoid another incident, you will bring in the operations IT managers, who are quite frankly, much smarter than you. Then sit down and shut the fuck up and listen to the solutions that these managers already know about, and which will easily fix the problem.
It would be best if all fools, MBAs, accountants and other technical illiterates were excluded from that meeting. A lawyer or too, on the other hand, may be quite helpful.
Hint. The solutions cost money. Guess why they were never implemented. Bonus question! Guess how expensive an unplanned failure is going to be.
Cheers!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
"The food on their flights is terrible even by airline standards"
They are just trying to give an authentic British food experience!
Slightly reduced bonus? He confirmed the issue was not his fault, and not that of the new guys maintaining the system... It was obviously an issue of the old people who didn't properly train or leave adequate documentation of the intricacies of the system when they left 5 months ago. If anything, an extra large bonus should be coming for getting rid of that level of incompetence.
Thirty four characters live here.
It would already be enough if their CEO has to personally pay for the blunder, and you'll see them replace cheap code chimps with sensible IT staff pretty fucking quickly.
CEOs don't give a shit about anything as long as it doesn't cut into their bottom line. And I mean their personal one, not the one of the company they are allegedly responsible for.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, first, Something Bad happened. Then, everybody tried to figure out What Went Wrong, but nobody could, because anybody who could find their ass with both hands had been laid off and their jobs outsourced to a faraway land where everything has to be microscopically explained, perhaps starting with "Well, hydrogen is one proton and one electron" and build from there. Then, The Suits started screaming for blood, but nobody they were screaming at was even competent enough to come up with a cogent response beyond "We're looking into it". Then, the Uber-PHB said "It's not because we shipped all our jobs to the lowest bidder, and It's Not My Fault".
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" -- or a combination of stupidity and greed.
What I can't explain is why he is STILL the CEO.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Cruz thinks he can get people to pay BA prices while slashing costs back beyond budget airline levels. He had form on this with Iberia. Meals cut, added extras cut on long haul flights, crew on zero hour contracts who aren't being paid with cancelled flights and all the IT staff within Britain being fired. No staff give a shit, and why should they?
Fuck you Alex. I hope this kills BA off.
Please do the needful and let me put my point.
Time to resign.
Oh, and insource. Your data is your most precious resource.
with a CEO like Alex Cruz
Ted's evil twin, separated at birth?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
I still insist that everybody has that backwards
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The *failure* wasnt a fault of the outsourcing - the problematic *recovery* almost certainly is a fault of the outsourcing. His statement doesnt cover both of those...
Maybe it wasn't a single supply, but rather a series of failures over the last 6 months which never got fixed.... and then the last one failed as well.
Or some forgot to plug in the monitoring cables for the redundant power supplies? I worked at a company where a hallway suddenly smelled like an open sewer for several weeks. What made it mysterious was that no sewer line went through that part of the building, leaving the building owner and plumber puzzled about the source. The smell came from leaking batteries inside a redundant UPS in the network closet on the other side of the wall. Since the monitoring cable wasn't plugged in, the one-man IT department didn't know that the UPS stopped working a long time ago.
I'll take the bait... Do you imagine that Ted is the good twin, or that they are identical evil twins?
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
He is right that "Outsourcing Not To Blame".
Power might of well have been the trigger, but the scale of the outage indicates much bigger problems afoot. The root cause of this turning out to be poor IT Governance, those big picture processes that prove the resilience is designed in, tested and proven. That is a failure of IT management.
IT treated as a cost centre, everything is outsourced on a lowest cost basis. Those suppliers are further whipped into line by crude metrics by managers that got a leg up by doing things quickly or cheaply, not properly. I see this kind of lack of concern for proper governance every day, address this lack of proper governance is by far the most difficult challenger I face as a consultant working in QA.
The NHS failure was exactly the same thing, the attack was the trigger, the root cause of the collapse of IT was governance failure by very senior management failure to ensure resilience was built in and proven.
IT is hard and how it works is invisible to those who don't understand it. BA might be screwed. Not only have they outsourced IT but it looks like they don't have the expertise anymore to even evaluate the quality of their IT or even prioritize and fund what their IT should be doing. So now not only is BA not good at IT they are doubly handicapped in that at least from their CEOs statements they can't even evaluate IT.
Oh, there's incompetence here, but it's not the India that's the problem.
In my experience India has an incredible number of talented, capable people, but like talented capable people everywhere they cost more than ignoramuses. But even a country of a billion people has a finite pool of top-notch talent. On the other hand India does have an almost limitless supply of subpar talent, and Indian businessmen are enterprising to a fault. If a Western CEO jis willing to shell out good money for sub-par people, there's a killing to be made.
So who, exactly, is the fool in this scenario?
The British Airways debacle was an instance of a catastrophic failure being brought on by an unusually but statistically predictable event. Therefore, the new vendor the CEO brought in wasn't up to the job he hired them for. That's the CEO's fault, end of story.
The real problem is that people who are good at IT operations make their job look too easy. A fool looking at the lack of drama in a well-run data center is apt to mistake that for the job being easy.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In the 1980s, I interviewed for an entry level graduate position with BA, to work with their IT systems. Their people were arrogant and ignorant. When I asked them what languages their systems were written in, the HR droids had no clue. I never got a call back and I am very glad about that. Although the corporate culture has probably changed many times since then, it seems that their attitudes have not improved any. The fact that the head honcho will not take responsibility now is no surprise. I bet he will keep on taking his over-inflated salary and bonuses though.
My absolute worst travel experiences have also been with British Air.
Fundamentally, what I don't like about them is that if you're rich and don't deviate even slightly from proper British behavior (drinking your tea with the proper pinkie elevation, etc) then they'll try to treat you pretty well. But if you need any kind of accommodation at all or, even worse, if you're not rich, they will go out of their way to make your life as miserable as absolutely possible.
If possible, I fly Japan Air. But these days they're in high demand to their general reputation for good customer service (even to people who aren't rich or need a little extra help). So it's hard to find available flights.
And British Air is the one airline that I go far out of my way to avoid.
Indeed, Japan Airlines is excellent! A few more I feel comfortable to recommend, are Finnair, THAI, and... the machmachine itself, Lufthansa. Lufthansa specifically does everything better where BA fails miserably, and yet they are a similar type of airline. Even Lufthansa's hubs (Frankfurt and Munich) function flawlessly and aren't a total hell, like Heathrow.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
No, bad IT people get paid 50000$ a year at age 47 while their peers are married with children, make 6-10 times that wage, and don't feel the need to fabricate a life on Slashdot.
That's too funny. My sysadmin peers on a nation-wide government IT project make $50K+ per year (engineers get $80K+ per year), most are ex-military and married with children, and none of have ever heard of Slashdot. And everyone has 20+ years of IT experience.
Little known fact: "keep calm and carry on" is actually originated as a phrase to tell people when they find out what's in black pudding.
"Keep a stiff upper lip" is the term of endurance you have to make when the figgy pudding hits your stomach. urghhs.
It's so bad that half of the British national dish, fish and chips, wasn't even invented in England it was invented in France, and the fish part was brought to England by Sephardic Jews.
The main reason the British had to let India into the commonwealth, was because otherwise they would have no good restaurants in London.
I went off a bit there, did I? But if you can find some nice maple syrup freshly dripped from a tree.......now there you have something good.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you have money issues, you think food and shelter, out of work for two years, etc.
I'm actually at the self-actualization level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. By living a modest lifestyle, I can focus on who I want to be and not on what everything think I should be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs#Self-actualization
Besides the fact that you are wasting your time, and can simply get an Arduino and blow away anything you could make from TTL chips?
When I learned electronics in the early 1990's, you couldn't simply dropped in a microcontroler and program your way out of it. (An FPGA was a bit different but I never got far enough in electronics to use that.) I was surprised how much of the old electronic theory came back when I started building circuits again. Maybe some day I'll get around to building a Z80 computer from scratch.